No, I don’t have it, but my website does: I registered irinarempt.eu for corporate purposes and I’ve convinced our Apache server that it’s called that and to find it where in fact it is, at http://rempt.xs4all.nl/irina/zaak. And also at http://www.valdyas.org/irina/zaak, because valdyas.org is an alias for rempt.xs4all.nl (but the server has nothing to do with that, it’s administered elsewhere, in a place I haven’t gone yet). The web site isn’t much yet, slightly more than a placeholder, but at least it’s there.

Read more ...

As you can see I’ve fixed the comments problem here, so I thought I’d go and add comments to Valdyis galsin as well. As soon as I opened the page template file I saw why I’d given up the last time around: comments are in fact enabled, but whatever I do I can’t get it to show on the page. It’s exactly the same syntax as here in Found Objects (in fact I copied and pasted it), all the files it might be looking for are the same, and it does read that bit of the page too because if I put some random text in place of the comments link it shows up all right.

WTF?

Any Blosxom gurus about who can shed light on the case? I admit that I’ve been tweaking the page template a bit more than with Found Objects (for one thing the postinfo is on the left side in a box of its own) but placement-by-stylesheet shouldn’t affect the commands inside the paragraph, should it?

And the previous time I tried to fix Valdyis galsin comments, I broke Found Objects comments. This time, apparently, it hasn’t happened yet. Let’s keep hoping.

I really shouldn’t read the supermarket magazine, Allerhande, because it doesn’t fail to make me shake my head in vexation.

Read more ...

Two weeks and a day after handing in my application form, I was still without a swimming pass. In I went with yet another free ticket (“forgotten property” this time). Nice: 8 degrees air temperature, which made the water feel warmer than the 21 or 22 degrees it must have been. And quiet, as always on Thursdays, because some of the regulars come in later to help with school swimming lessons. I hardly noticed my cold— after all, it’s normal to have stinging eyes and a nose full of water in the pool.

Just as I was going out, the swimming coordinator (Jan D; all the men working there seem to be called Jan) called after me “Are you Mrs [horrible mangling of my last name]? Or [different horrible mangling of my last name]?” Me: “[my actual last name], yes.” It turned out that (a) they’d lost my form; (b) I did have a record in their database, but very incomplete, and they’d spelt my last name wrong as usual; (c) for some mysterious reason there was a picture of someone else in the record. So Jan called Computer Woman, who entered my name (spelt right this time), address, phone number, etcetera and took another picture. A blank pass was made to see that it could be done, and so I could see that the picture actually looked like me.

Then Jan handed me a form identical to the one I’d already filled in. “Why?” I asked. “The only thing I can’t tell you now is the bank account to get the subscription fee from. All the other stuff I’ve just told to your colleague and she’s entered it.” But this was for their files; apparently they have a whole archive of handwritten stuff instead of either proper backups or printouts of what they’ve got in their database. (No wonder things disappear!) That makes four times that I’m giving them my details. But tomorrow, when I hand it in, they’ll give me my pass. Whew.

ETA: Jan just called to say they’ve found my form at the other location. Just as I was looking up the account number. And, commendably, they’re making the pass valid from today, effectively giving me two weeks of free swimming to make up for the annoyance.

Today in the supermarket I overheard a young man, in his early twenties by the look of him, saying to his friends “I ate an apple the other day, for the first time in my life”.

I can imagine that people can grow to twenty without eating specific foods: growing up in a vegetarian family, for instance, and never tasting meat until adulthood if at all. Or growing up Jewish or Muslim and never trying pork. And many a friend of our daughters has had her first taste of Indonesian food, home-baked bread, artichokes, venison, squid, seitan, pizza made from scratch rather than being bought frozen, or even watermelon —all things we don’t think particularly exotic or outrageous— in our house. But apples! I buy them practically by the bushel (do apples come in bushels?) because the girls can go through a kilo in one single day.

Aren’t apples a childhood staple? Didn’t he ever get apple sauce with a children’s menu when he was small? Or did he, until now, only know bottled apple sauce and vaguely realise that apples are what it’s made of, as most people know bread is made from flour but don’t know what to do when faced with actual flour?

Unfortunately I didn’t catch what he thought of the apple. I hope he liked it.

I’m trying to build up from 30 to 40 laps this week —one kilometer— by doing two more each day. I’m not very inclined to actually count while swimming; I’d much rather daydream, chat to acquaintances when we pass in the water, plan what to cook, think up roleplaying adventures, in fact all the brain-on-idle things I do when sitting for art classes too. (Except that swimming is a lot easier on my muscles!)

So I thought of a trick. At the start this morning I wore four covered elastic bands (metal-free ponytail holders) on my left wrist and transferred one to the other side after each two laps, whenever I arrived on the side of the heptagonal [1] guard-house. When they were all on the right, I knew that I’d done eight laps. Next, move them to the left one by one for 16. Then the whole procedure again for 32.

[1] Really. I counted the sides four times, because I couldn’t believe it wasn’t 6 or 8.

Tomorrow, I’ll start with one band on the right and move it to the left for the first two laps. Wednesday two on the right, Thursday three, and on Friday I’ll have reached the kilometer and will celebrate by wearing one band in a different colour, because I’ve got only four purple ones.

I also seem to have increased my speed from a kilometer to almost a mile an hour— one 25-meter lap in exactly one minute.